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This series is designed to help get your articles approved on the first submission. We’ve looked at past submission records to find the most common reasons why articles aren’t approved on the initial try. Since we know your time is precious, we’ve compressed this information into individual 2-minute videos.

This episode is a reminder of the number of links allowed in a submission and where those links can be placed.

Downloadable Versions:

For those of you that don’t have two minutes to spare, here’s a brief outline of the second “2 Minute Approval Tip”:

2 Self-Serving and 2 Non Self-Serving Links – A self-serving link is any link that you have a vested interest in promoting. A non self-serving link is a link that you do not have a vested interested in promoting but adds value to the article.

Less Means More When Including Links – It isn’t necessary to include 2 self-serving links in every article. Including links that are unrelated to the topic usually makes the article appear spammy.

Keep Links Below the Fold – “Below the fold” refers to the way a newspaper is folded across the middle to cut front page stories in half. In this case, links must be kept out of the first 3 paragraphs of text (the area above “the fold”) to keep your readers’ attention.

Try to Limit Self-Serving Links to the Resource Box – Only 1 self-serving link is allowed in the body of an article. Including more than this will get your article rejected.

Watch for more “2 Minute Approval Tips” in the coming weeks. Or click here to view tip #1. And before you submit your next quality original article, leave us a comment to share one of your own approval tips.

Thanks Marc for providing yet another great video on first article submission tips. I learned a lot today by watching this “2 Minute Approval Limit Your Links” video. I had no idea we were allowed only 2 self serving links and 2 non self serving to submitted articles. This will help me for my next article submission. Great information…looking forward to the next video :-)

This was a very helpful 2 minute tip. I’m loving this series so far. I learned that I can place a self-serving link within the body of my article; a fact which I did not know. I knew that I could place two links in my resource box, but I always thought that links in the article body were strictly forbidden, self-serving or not. It’s good to know that I am allowed two non-self serving links when I’d like to share some good information with readers.

Can someone correct me if I am wrong, but Marc is saying we are technically allowed up to 3 self serving links for all our articles? 2 have to remain in the Resource box as usual and now we are allowed to include 1 more link inside the article body? The thing is the article body does not allow the link tags so I’m not sure how you create the link. Can anyone help out on this? Thanks in advance.

I’d like to add that one should be quite careful about the reference links they leave. You see, websites come and go, but you want your articles to be evergreen, and therefore if that website goes, the link is dead and that reflects directly on you, often ruining your article. See that point, so don’t be too quick to throw lots of external links in the article that you don’t have control over, because they may soon go offline and then you have to go fix your article, meanwhile you look stupid.

FYI: just because it is a government site doesn’t mean that page will be there in the future. NASA changed all their websites, and killed 2/3 of their links a couple years back. Stuff also comes and goes off the Presidential Website location.

I dont like to put links in my article, I keep it in the resource box. I do not do deep linking. So – the whole domain would have to disappear before my link becomes dead. Pages do change, heck, I revamped my website twice in four years – so there ya go!

That is an excellent point you made about the links perhaps coming up broken over time. I was thinking of how this could be remedied and several ideas came to mind. First, I am not sure if articles can be edited once they have been published. Perhaps someone can answer this for me? If they can be edited, then it would be a simple task for less-prolific writers to just check their links occasionally and repair them if needed. For more prolific writers, though, this poses quite a problem.

Maybe the future will bring a link-checking feature to EzineArticles? Perhaps an alert for broken links? I’m not too sure of how difficult something like that would be to implement or even if it is feasible. It was just a thought that came to mind as I considered this problem. The only other solution I could think of was to avoid the non self-serving links altogether and the credibility and wealth of information they could potentially offer an article and its readers. I’m not sure which is the better option at this point; place a link to further reading, hope that it stays active and risk that it doesn’t or simply write with authority on the topic with just a brief sentence or two stating your qualifications in the resource box?

As your NASA example proves, you really can’t even trust links from well-established sites. I suppose I can simply use them anyhow and try my best to keep after them for myself. Still the question of whether or not articles are editable after publication looms. I have one published article, it has an edit button, but will the edit option disappear after my article has been live for a set period of time? I sadly do not have enough experience with EzineArticles to know the answer to this.

I like your 2 minute videos, they are succint and easy to follow. Yet, I have received reports from EzineArticles that a link is broken when it’s not. The article goes offline until it is corrected. I hope that EzineArticles will improve its tracking software.

Thanks for the clarification. It always confuses me when I seem to be getting differing points of view, but you’ve cleared that up for me. As it happens, I’m with most of the other commenters here – the resource box is the most natural place for self-serving links anyway.

I’m already using the resource box with two self serving links but I have not used the non self-serving links though. It would be useful when writing tutorials, how to articles, or maybe informational articles. Thinking out load and this is a great tip.

Identifying quality non-self serving link resources for a reader is not difficult but often times overlooked because we sometimes forget who our audience is – people who are trying to gain knowledge in a certain area or niche. This video serves as a reminder to try and provide better quality info AND links for our readers. Great video!

Links above the fold look spammy and we reject for that. Your article is your GIVE and your resource box is your TAKE. The traffic that your article generates to your website is dependent on your ability to work with this concept.

My article was not approved although I send it for approval two times and then ? have written to the support team of EzineArticles.com. They replied me as saying: “My web site’s language is not in English”
? think this is so unreasonable..!!

I’m sorry to hear that you think our policy is unreasonable. Please understand that we are an English language based site, therefore the bulk of our readers are English speaking. If an English-speaking reader reading an English article wants to find out more about you and your site, they will click on your link. For them to discover a non-English site would be a bad user experience for them. We are dedicated to creating a good user experience for all of our readers.

A self-serving link is any link that you have an interest in, or benefit from. If you were to link to your article, whether on EzineArticles.com or another site, this would be considered self-serving because you would benefit by way of promotion and traffic.

A true non self-serving link would not directly benefit you, but rather would be provided as a resource for the reader. Non self-serving links are commonly .edu, .org, or .gov sites.